San Diego City Embarks On Regulations For Medicinal Marijuana Dispensaries

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Aired 9/14/10

San Diego City Council has voted to start developing land use regulations that would define where medicinal marijuana dispensaries can legally operate.

SAN DIEGO  San Diego City Council has voted to start developing land use regulations that would define where medicinal marijuana dispensaries can legally operate. Councilman Carl DeMaio was the lone dissenting vote.

The land use regulations proposed by the city’s Marijuana Task Force were made tougher, so that medical marijuana dispensaries can only operate in certain light commercial zones and have to be 1,000 feet away from schools, churches, playgrounds, libraries and parks.

Currently, more than 100 dispensaries operate in the city. Kate Valentine of Americans for Safe Access calculates the proposed zoning would only allow about 15 dispensaries.

"They want standards, they want certainty, they want regulations," she said, " but by making the regulations too restrictive, progress on this issue will grind to a halt."

Councilman Todd Gloria says the proposal is a compromise forged to get enough council votes to move ahead.

"Politics is the act of what’s possible," Gloria said, "and what we had to do was craft a series of rules that would provide patients with safe access while responding to the concerns of some of those in the community who feel that some of the locations are inappropriate."

The council was asked to add universities and colleges to the list of places which need a 1,000-foot buffer zone, but did not approve that addition.

City staff will now work on ordinances to regulate the location and operation of dispensaries and return to the council for a vote next spring.

$113 billion is spent on marijuana every year in the U.S., and because of the federal prohibition *every* dollar of it goes straight into the hands of criminals. Far from preventing people from using marijuana, the prohibition instead creates zero legal supply amid massive and unrelenting demand. The scale of the harm this causes far exceeds any benefit obtained from keeping marijuana illegal.

According to the ONDCP, at least sixty percent of Mexican drug cartel money comes from selling marijuana in the U.S., they protect this revenue by brutally torturing, murdering and dismembering countless innocent people.

If we can STOP people using marijuana then we need to do so NOW, but if we can't then we must legalize the production and sale of marijuana to adults with after-tax prices set too low for the cartels to match. One way or the other, we have to force the cartels out of the marijuana market and eliminate their highly lucrative marijuana incomes - no business can withstand the loss of sixty percent of its revenue!

To date, the cartels have amassed more than 100,000 "foot soldiers" and operate in 230 U.S. cities, and it's now believed that the cartels are "morphing into, or making common cause with, what would be considered an insurgency" (Secretary of State Clinton, 09/09/2010). The longer the cartels are allowed to exploit the prohibition the more powerful they'll get and the more our own personal security will be put in jeopardy.

I am glad that the City Council is setting standardsfor the siting of Medical Marijuana dispensaries.

However, I am afraid that in imitating Los Angeles,San Diego is about to make the same ominous mistakes.

MM dispensaries should be sited next door to policestations, to discourage robbers and to insure that they are operatedwithin the law. They should be under 24 hour video surveillance.

Dispensaries should also be prohibited from cash sales.All sales should be done by credit or debit cards, so there won'tbe the temptations of thousands of dollars in tills to attract robbers.

The Council's understandable and commendableconcern with protecting neighborhood quality of life and preventingaccess to children is unfortunately resulting in setting thesecash-heavy treasure-boxes in remote areas far from police protection.

It would be far more effective and safer to site MMdispensaries to within a block of police stations. This would alsosimplify police supervision of the operations, and preventtax cheating on the part of operators.

Why should there be a 1000 foot buffer around universities and colleges? I do not know where to start with this. This is beyond stupid. By being further than 1000 feet from a campus do you think college students will be less likely to purchase marijuana? Or do you think that the people that go to the dispensaries are a bad influence on college students? I really do not understand the purpose of regulating dispensary locations. Please stop wasting our tax payer money.

Stop the anarchy.Have FDA approve marijuana smoke as treatment for medical conditions. Have medical marijuana be prescribed by real doctors and dispensed from real pharmacies.Start with Congress and legalize marijuana at the Federal level.Then the states can control, regulate and tax at the State level.Do it right for the sake of the country.

When did the USA go back to voodoo medicine? Get some REAL studies on marijuana. Group A with real marijuana, Group B with placebo. Then switch to see who is lying. Group B with real marijuana, Group A with placebo. Test to see if marijuana really treats pain or it is just a mind altering drug or all in the mind of the pot user. Get some REAL studies. All this voodoo studies on pot are all ANECDOTAL.

Investigators at McGill University in Montreal assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity in 23 subjects with chronic post-traumatic or post-surgical neuropathic pain in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial. Participants in the study received a single inhalation of 25 mg of 9.4 percent herbal cannabis or placebo three times daily. All of the volunteers in the study suffered from refractory pain for which conventional therapies had proven ineffective

Funny how the people that claim MMJ is Voodoo medicine or claim that MMJ has no medicinal value, can't seem to figure out how to do a simple google search. It took me about 3 minutes to find that information for you. If given more time I could find 10 more similar to that done by universities and doctors throughout the WORLD. (That's filtering out all the non medical community research/papers/opinions I am talking legit research) And that's just regarding pain relief if you want research about the validity of MMJ in general I could site 100!

Wake up! It isn't 1950 anymore YOU have the power to do your own research and think for yourself. I suggest you do so. Stop being a sheep and taught to just parrot what you've been told.